Marjorie Jane MacGregor Young

Introduction
Marjorie Jane MacGregor Young died in the early morning hours of September 14, 2018 of age-related multiple-organ failure. She was 86.

Marjorie is survived by her husband of 65 years, Donald Young; her children, Nan Cohen, Ned and Jock Young; her grandchildren, Amy Cohen Walderman, Nor Young and Ciaran Young. Gone before her were her sisters Dorothy Rae Jones and Patricia Scott.

Life Story
Marge was born in Kooskia, Idaho on November 8th, 1931. Her mother was a school teacher in the one room school house in that one-road town on the Nez Perce Indian Reservation. Her father was a forest ranger on the Selway National Forest. Sister Rae was born in 1935, and sister Patricia, called Patsy, was born the following year.

When Marge was 8 years old, they family moved to Hamilton Montana. Her father (known as "Mac") had requested this position as a district ranger, passing up a promotion in the Administrative offices. For three years, winters were spent in Hamilton, and when school was out the whole family picked up and moved to the Magruder Ranger Station for the summer. The house for the ranger and his family was a log cabin with chinks between the logs. Marge's younger sisters stuck pretty close to their mother, but Marge was Daddy's girl. Wearing overalls she would often hike the trails with her dad while he checked on trail maintenance and the state of telephone wires strung from tree to tree.

These years were perhaps the most important to the formation of her identity, and she remembered them as idyllic. There was a library in Hamilton, and a little dog named Zipper, who belonged to a neighbor, but became Marge's shadow. He was even allowed in the library, if his feet were clean.

Things changed in 1942, when the family moved to Townsend. Zipper had to be left behind, a war had begun, and there were no more summers in the mountains. The schools were not great, the forest service work was not particularly exciting, and Mac was nearing retirement age.
The family scrimped and saved during the next few years—which was what everybody did during the war. In 1947 Mac reached the 30 Year mark of his work for the Forest Service. He chose to take an early retirement. They had always planned to retire in the Willamette Valley, where the climate was mild and there was easy access to both the mountains and the ocean. Now they realized that the girls needed better schools if they were going to win scholarships in order to attend college. In July they packed up all they had and moved to Salem, Oregon so that Marjorie could begin her junior year of high school there.

Life in Salem was much harder than expected. Mac had trouble finding a job to supplement his meager Forest Service retirement pension. The hard-earned savings melted away, and it became necessary for his wife, Elizabeth to take a job as well. The huge Salem High school was a big challenge for Marge. Her family was considered poor, and the social structure was almost impossible to break into. But she enjoyed playing French horn in the band, and excelled in academics, especially English and Social Studies. A fellow student named Don Young was an aggravation to her, because he always won the history prize, while she came in second.

Marge did earn a scholarship, and enrolled at Oregon State College in the fall of 1948, initially studying business, and living in a women's cooperative house. Don also attended Oregon State, pledging the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. Marge and Don didn't pay much attention to each other until midway through college, when Don finally broke up with his long-time steady girl-friend.

After two years in the business school, Marge felt that it was not a good fit. She decided to take a year off to work, bolster her savings and rethink her career direction. Don took to dropping in to see her when he was in Salem, and love blossomed. They were married on June 27th, 1953. They celebrated their 65th anniversary this past summer with a small party at their retirement community.

Don's education was been funded by an ROTC scholarship, so the 2 years following college were spent in Los Angeles at the Cheli Airforce Depot. On their return to Salem they bought a house, and that is where all three of their children were born, Nan in 1956, Ned in 1958 and Jock in 1961.

Don's work took them first to Portland and then to Corvallis, Oregon, in 1967, where the family lived for the next 20 years. Their three kids made their way through the school system, and attended either Oregon State, or the University of Oregon. Marge too, returned to school, finishing the degree she had started all those years before, and graduating with a Liberal Arts degree and high honors in 1979.

They were members of the Congregational Church in Corvallis, where Marge served variously as Sunday School Superintendent, Bulletin editor and church secretary. She was also a member of the Adult Education Committee, bringing many interesting speakers to the church to teach workshops.

For most of her adult life, Marge was fascinated by how various concepts within religion, philosophy, psychology, sociology and politics spoke about women's lives and women's strengths. Around 1981, Marge enrolled in the Master of Arts in Values program offered by San Francisco Theological seminary. This began a period of intensive intellectual exploration culminating in her thesis project which was entitled Women's Sense of Integrity: A Contemporary Conflict in Values. She received her Master's Degree in 1986.

The year following the completion of her degree was a very difficult one for Marge. Her beloved sister Rae died of cancer, contributing to a tough period of adjustment. Don decided to take an early retirement and they chose to make a new start, moving to the Seattle area to be near their daughter, Nan, who was newly married, and working for the University of Washington Libraries.

Marge embarked on a career of teaching small community college classes on topics that particularly interested her. The writings of Joseph Campbell and Marcel Proust; classes on personal journal writing and a highly popular discussion-based class entitled Fact and Fiction. She was a co-facilitator for this class for 20 years. These latter courses were offered through the Creative Retirement Institute (CRI) based at Edmonds Community College.

Marge and Don were founding members of CRI. Don was heavily involved in the finance committee and Marge served on the Curriculum Committee and Speaker Committee. She was Editor of the quarterly newsletter, The CRIer, from 1995 through 2007, contributing book reviews and interviews.

Marge and Don chose to make their church home at the Edmonds Unitarian Universalist Congregation. They joined in 1992 and were active in many areas during their 25 year of membership. Marge began with the Library Committee. Contributing reviews of new acquisitions for the Newsletter. They participated in a couple's book discussion group for many years, and made life-long friends. In November of 2000 they established the Bookstore, which they managed until 2006. Marge had always dreamed of having a bookstore, and relished this chance to share her wide-ranging knowledge of books with the congregation.

1992 Marge and Don attended their first of many Elderhostels. That same year their first grandchild Amy Elizabeth Cohen, was born to Nan and husband Bob in Lake Forest Park. She was followed by Ned and Mary's two children, Ciaran Bartley Young in 1998, and Nor Bartley Young in 2002. Thus began 10 good years of world-wide travel, and cross country trips visiting Ned's family wherever they were living at the moment; and Jock who had settled at the University of Montana in Missoula. A sturdy Toyota truck and camper was their usual mode of travel, whether to the desert southwest, the mountain lakes of Montana and Idaho or the cities of Nashville, New Orleans, San Antonio, or Boston. Overseas excursions included Hawaii, Western Europe, Scandinavia, England and Scotland.

The bodies held up for most of this, but by 2013 time had taken its toll. Travel was becoming difficult and the house and yard had become too much to care for, so the beloved house in Mill Creek was sold. They moved to Brighton Court Retirement Community; a place they nicknamed the EUUC Annex, because of the large number of EUUC members who found a home there when they reached that stage of their lives.

At the beginning of 2017 there was one final move. It was time to move to a place which could provide more safety monitoring and help with daily activities. Sunrise of Lynnwood was the chosen place, where the kind and caring staff provided structure and love. Marge and Don celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary there this past June, with a small party organized by the staff. Marge's last days were spent at Sunrise under hospice care and the watchful presence of the staff she had come to know and trust.

Personal and Professional Affiliations
Throughout her life Marge devoted herself to social services, contributing a great deal of her time to the First Congregational Church, and the League of Women Voters of Corvallis, Oregon; Edmonds Unitarian Universalist Congregation, and the Creative Retirement Institute a division of Edmonds Community College.